Mind, body and soul - what makes a champion?

The celebrated Sigmund Freud aptly captured this sentiment when he said:

I am not really a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, and not a thinker. I am nothing but ... an adventurer … a Conquistador – with the boldness, and the tenacity of that type of being.

In other words, from his own assessment, Freud was not especially skilled or talented. Rather, he had the courage to put himself into the race to begin with. He had a champion mindset!

So, we can now see that the so-called neurosis of the athlete to which I alluded earlier is no pathology whatsoever. Rather, it is the athlete's inevitable single-minded dedication to a passion – a dedication that is fuelled and sustained by their mindset.

The great challenge for us now is to unravel the ingredients of our mindsets, and especially to determine how mindset is shaped by our genetic make-up, by our education, by our culture, our society, and even by our ongoing emotional interactions.

I believe that sports provides a unique platform for this exploration. And, who knows, training regimes may ultimately be tailored to each athlete's personal background.

I have been exploring what it takes to excel at sports. But, why do we ever direct our minds to sports in the first place? Why is sport so incredibly alluring?

It seems quite bizarre that adults bother to engage in sports. And even more bizarre, that hundreds of millions of people worldwide are passive spectators of sports.

For example, traffic accidents dramatically fell during the televised World Series. And, not only the traffic stopped. Viagra sales plummeted during the series. As Rupert Murdoch says: "Sport absolutely overpowers film and everything else in the entertainment genre."

Obviously, for something to be so alluring, it must be appealing to our most fundamental human make-up. And we would expect this appeal to be manifest across cultures and throughout time.

It has! The ancient Egyptians and the people of Mesopotamia had a tradition in athletics at least 5000 years ago. Tombs that are more than 4000 years old depict sophisticated wrestling scenes. And sport was central to the culture of ancient Greece: the Olympic Games are themselves nearly 3000 years old.

But, I wonder how many of us believe that sport was brought to Australia by the Europeans?